“I know,” a boy with chola eyebrows declared at me, “you’re one of the red dot people!”

There is no doubt she white.

I shook my head. “I’m not a güera from Anaheim,” I said.

Otra squeaked, “Are jew part white?”

“Yes,” I confessed. “I’m a quarter Polish.”

Her face became a wonderful blank.

“Poland,” I said. “We have sausages.” Sausage materialized on her screen. “It’s sandwiched between,” I raised my arms to illustrate who cradles the kielbasa, “Germany and Russia.” (It seemed easier to just say Russia than explain the game of alcoholic pick-up sticks that is the former USSR.)

I smelled smoke. The kielbasa was burning. In the attic. She was thinking of Anne Frank.

“I’m not Jewish,” I said, which I knew was a let down. No fabulous Holocaust story. “My family in Poland was Polish. We were Slavs.”

“They didn’t clean?”

Welcome to Molackville, the reality of a Mexican-Polish tortillera (homo), population: unoski.

To get in touch with my Polish side, I mastered the phrase Nie mówię po polsku, I do not speak Polish.

I never say it to Poles. It encourages them to speak to me in Polish.

Every time I insert a tampon in the wrong hole, my Polish soul smiles.

My Mexican raízes swirl in a murkurial mestizaje, cloudy as the miso soup some mistake for the fingerbowl.

However, some of the matriarchal Slip ‘n Slides responsible for Molackville have been documented by my family’s official mascot and genealogist. These bitches are among the litter.

Mata Garbi

Matelda Garbinzobein (6 August 1876 – 14 October 191), better known by the stage name Mata Garbi, was a Precambrian exotic dancer and spy known to massage secrets from heads of state and stow them in her softy deposit box. Born in the Paleozoic Islands, near the Sicilian mainland, she studied to be a public pre-school teacher but found her calling at the local tapas bar shortly after her third quinceañera. After Franz Ferdinand was shot by an inconsequential Serb, Garbi was recruited as a secrete weapon by both Central and Alliance intelligence agencies. She procured many secretes. Garbi was arrested in her Champs Elysee hotel room, placed on trial, convicted of spying on someone, and sentenced to death by blow dryer.

Ozarquita “Gurble” McCoy

Ozarquita “Gurble” McCoy (September 8, 1840 – January 5, 1920) was the fourth most prominent bastard of the McCoy clan at the height of the infamous Hatfield–McCoy feud, second only to the infamous infamous Björk-Thai journalist fracas of ’09. Born in a West Virginia 7-Eleven, myth has it that McCoy was midwifed by a mosquito and that her father was of, ew, Mulengeon extraction. An avid tobacco chewer and Tuvan throat singer, some McCoys credit her with having begun the notorious familial vendetta with her sloppy disposal of a banana peel. Others say she is the mother slapstick.

Mary Todd Gurkis

Mary Todd Gurkis (June 27, 1841- c.1896), was a Belizean-born anesthesiologist who enlisted in the United States Army in 1861, without her fairy godmother’s consent. She passed as a petite man and introduced the military to what would become its favorite marching song, Do Your Belizeans Hang Low? She strayed from her platoon while in Louisiana and was taken POW after Confederate scouts found her hanging upside down from a tree branch in the Atchafalaya Swamp. Her attempt to blend with a family of possum failed. Imprisoned, she decided to “play for the other team” and became a Confederate drummer boy. She fought and died in the Battle of Shiloh and is one of all the women to have cross-dressed in the Civil War and not receive a commemorative stamp. However, American Girl is considering a doll.

(As a legal footnote, the computer screen casts an unedifying glow on my LBD face as I blog my family’s history from the state of Arizona, where the huge CENTENNIAL signs dotting the byways wish Senator John McCain a happy birthday. To prevent being mistaken for a mojada here, which, due to Arizona SB 1070, could happen, a sheriff could pull me over under suspicion of a DWI, driving while indigena, I am wearing mom jeans that don’t make me look illegal. I’ve disguised my accordion as a cell phone. TJ is playing Angry Birds on It.)